skymurdock asked: for the three-sentence AU meme, not that I personally consider this an AU: Steve Rogers being IN SPACE and not knowing wtf is going on down on earth, go.
All right, did you mean ‘Star Trek mashup,’ because I refuse
to dignify Dick Spencer with even the slightest iota of my attention and I LOVE
STAR TREK. Um, there’s definitely gonna
be more than three sentences, I tried but I got overexcited, sorry. THERE’S A READMORE, THAT’S HOW OUT OF HAND THIS GOT.
Starbase
616 is approximately five days at max warp past the generally accepted
middle-of-nowhere, the kind of place they send you when you’ve slept with a
higher-up’s spouse (or spouses, Security Officer Kellan will say mournfully,
not that he knew it at the time) or after you’ve blown up a very expensive
piece of equipment (Chief of Engineering Maxime Rochert is only allowed near
the engines with supervision, is the running joke). So when the ship drifts in, Starbase 616 has
a hot second of panic, because they have never
gotten a ship since the last troop of poor suckers was released from this
purgatory. It’s even worse because the USS Avenge left its last leg about a parsec
back and seems to have crawled in on some kind of souped-up impulse engine none
of them have seen before. It’s even worse because, once they get on
board to check why they’re not receiving a response to their thirty-one hails,
they find:
an
AI that apparently fried itself and shut down all non-life support or non-propulsion
systems,
a
piloting and navigation console that looks like it’s been ripped apart and
hotwired together,
and
almost a dozen (sort of living) legends in deep cryostasis in the medical bay,
with no other signs of life.
i can’t believe i still have to unfollow people for putting terfs on my dash.
“don’t reblog terfs” is not an attempt at a political gotcha, it is an urgent matter of safety for trans people esp. trans girls. a terf is a transphobe and transmisogynist being legitimized as a feminist - this means that any trans person seeking out feminist resources can be suddenly hit with abusive, violent rhetoric. terfs do not have a mere disagreement with trans women, they hate us and constantly throw verbal abuse & harassment in order to suicide bait.
it is absolutely a responsibility to not legitimize their voices.
nothing a terf has to say is worth the total disregard for our lives a snippy reblog signifies. this isn’t hard and there’s no fucking excuse.
if I ever reblog someone you know to be a TERF A) rest assured it was not intentional and B) pls let me know right away so that I can remove that filth from my blog
A common fat-phobic belief is that fat people are fat because they overeat. A recent submission to @facebooksexism perfectly illustrates this stereotype and the harmful classist attitudes it perpetuates:
Like most fat-phobic beliefs, this stereotype is completely wrong.
It is well accepted in public health science that food insecurity – which is the lack of consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living – predicts higher body weight.
Limited resources and lack of access to nutritious, affordable foods. Heavily processed, low-nutrition foods are usually cheaper, but are more calorie dense and less satisfying to eat.
Cycles of food deprivation and overeating. Low income people often run out of money for necessities like food before their next paycheck arrives, resulting in extended periods of hunger and starvation followed by periods of compensatory eating when the paycheck arrives. Such eating patterns cause weight gain over time.
High levels of stress, anxiety, & depression, all of which cause physiological changes resulting in weight gain over time.
Limited access to health care. Many chronic health conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid dysfunction, and type II diabetes, cause weight gain when left untreated.
All of this means that systematic oppression causes people to be fat for reasons that are outside of their personal control, and that poor fat people are not lying when they report that they cannot afford to put food on the table. Stop spreading the harmful, oppressive, and fat-phobic belief that you can
judge a person’s nutrition or eating habits by the size of their body.
- Mod D
READ THIS.
Also, as a reminder, the reason that cycles of deprivation and overeating affect the body so much is because we evolved to survive those cycles. When someone goes through a period of deprivation, we have millions of years of evolution that go “OH SHIT WE COULD STARVE BETTER HANG ONTO THOSE CALORIES.” Hence weight gain.
In “How to SURVIVE the Hunger Games pt. 1,” MatPat points out that one of the best way to survive is to put on as much weight as possible–five pounds of fat is 17,500 calories, or enough calories to survive for 8.5 days with no food whatsoever. That’s the point of fat, after all, to have enough energy to live in periods of low- or no food.
Having to go through cycles of deprivation sets the body into survival mode. 10,000 years ago, having extra fat meant the literal difference between life and death when there simply was no food available. If I don’t have access to sufficient nutrition, my body automatically hangs on to every calorie available and turns it into fat. because it knows that there will be a time when I need that fat to survive. It doesn’t matter if it makes me look “ugly” or “unappealing” because my survival doesn’t hinge on me being pretty, it hinges on me being able to continue living.
While we don’t live in the exact same conditions–here in America, there is food, even if I can’t access it–we simply haven’t had enough time to evolve to change how the body responds to scarcity.
So saying that someone who lives in a constant state of food insecurity is lying because they’re fat? It’s a profoundly stupid, uninformed thing to think. If you want to worry about obesity, the best way to do it is guarantee that everyone–and I mean EVERYONE–has access to nutritious food. Not ramen, not cheap, shitty, high-calorie low-nutritious food, but good food.
(I live in the fucking future, in one of the richest countries in the world, and yet there are people who don’t have enough to eat. I cannot begin to tell you how infuriating this is to me.)
Access to healthier foods at a low cost would not solve the problem at hand without proper education, though. And there are plenty of nutritious foods that are at very low cost that most people who are worried about getting food on the table should be buying instead of the cheap, but unhealthy options.
Do you honestly think that if the solution to food insecurity was as simple as just buying rice and beans, that anyone would still be starving in the US or Canada? Do you really believe that poor parents are just choosing to let their children go hungry because they are too ignorant and uneducated to know better? Honestly, a person must hold some pretty prejudiced and condescending beliefs about poor people to justify this type of comment.
For the record: Poor people do not need “education” from wealthy people who have never experienced true food insecurity concerning the best ways to live and eat. Poor people are not poor and lacking food because they are ignorant, or uneducated, or lazy. Yes, even poor fat people! Poor people suffer from food insecurity because they experience legitimate social, economic, and physical barriers to accessing adequate food to survive. Period.
Poor people need to be able to earn a real living wage (or be provided with more than the most basic bare minimums to support both good physical AND mental health – for their own version of healthy – by social welfare programs such as disability, retirement, and SNAP benefits.
We need to not have to balance two or more jobs and sometimes school just to scrape by and be so exhausted from physical and emotional labor required by their shitty jobs where they are overworked and undervalued that leave them unable to cook the nutritious food they want to eat.
We need to be treated like competent human beings because we ARE.
We need rich (or even who are well into “comfortable” range) people to shut the entire hell up about deciding what we need to eat and whether or not poor drug users even qualify as human enough to justify being able to eat.
We need a healthcare system that isn’t dizzying in its ineptitude. After nearly four years of Medicaid not paying for what Medicare didn’t cover I finally got frustrated enough to seek help from a legal aid society. It should not be necessary to HIRE A LAWYER – even one who works pro bono – to get bills paid. I tried four years on my own and I am an intelligent, educated person. I can’t even imagine how people with developmental and learning disabilities and/or the elderly handle this if they do not have a strong support system.
We need to remind you that we ALSO pay taxes that find these programs. We get taxed at a higher percentage, and we earn dramatically less money.
The assumption that there are are plenty of cheap nutritious foods available for everyone omits a serious problem that many American face: food deserts. According to the American Nutrition Association, food deserts are “parts of the country vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas. This is largely due to a lack of grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and healthy food providers.This has become a big problem because while food deserts are often short on whole food providers, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, instead, they are heavy on local quickie marts that provide a wealth of processed, sugar, and fat laden foods[.]”
How common are food deserts in America? Take a look:
Those are a LOT of places where Americans, especially poor Americans, don’t have access to whole foods, especially fresh fruits and veggies. You can’t buy what isn’t available in your local grocery.
And you also can’t buy what you can’t afford. Costs are relative. What is cheap to someone who is upper middle class or wealthy may be too costly for someone struggling to make ends meet–and anyone on SNAP has to meet income and resource tests.
Nor does SNAP automatically pay for everything in the grocery cart. A single person could get, at most, $194 per month. That’s just for food items (hand soap, sanitary napkins, toilet paper, etc., are not covered and must be paid for by the person). Assuming that the SNAP recipient goes shopping once a week, that would permit them to spend $48.50 SNAP credit on food each week in a four-week month. In a long month that contains half a week or so at the end, the food budget might drop to $38.80 SNAP credits per week.
That’s not much money to pay for an entire week’s worth of groceries. And allotments go down as numbers of people per household increase. Two people in a household would get $357 per month ($89.25 per week in a four-week month, or $44.62 for one and $44.63 for the other; $71.40 per week in a five-week month, or $35.70 for each person).
And $194 per month for one person (or $357 for two people) is the MAXIMUM.
Most recipients won’t get nearly that much.
So yes. I can well believe that Sharon’s monthly SNAP benefits do not allow her to purchase much food. It’s simple mathematics.
All of this, plus a note that most medical measures of fatness are standardized around abled upperclass cis white men and are far less accurate estimates of body fat, even on broad scale, for women and people of color. Physically disabled people and trans people are typically not looked at in general when these measures are constructed, instead they are standardized around abled cis men. Poor people also tend to be shorter, which measures like BMI penalize.
The demographics of poor people are different than those of wealthy people.
BMI was directly created as a eugenicist ideal and the fact that it stigmatizes women, poor people, and people of color as deviants more is a feature, not a bug.
That combination of stigmatizing fat people and using a measure designed to call poor people, women, and people of color fatter is absolutely also about policing and medicalizing the bodies of the poor, women, trans people, people of color, and disabled people.
^^ This is some spot-on analysis right here. Thank you, I agree with everything you say.
I WANT GAY ROMANTIC COMEDIES GOD DAMN IT I AM SO TIRED OF THE ONLY GAY MOVIES BEING DRAMATICALLY SAD BECAUSE THEYRE GAY AND SOMEONE HAS AIDS OR SOMEONES A COWBOY OR SOMEONE DIES GIVE ME YOU’VE GOT MAIL WITH TWO WOMEN GIVE ME SIXTEEN CANDLES WITH TWO BOYS GIVE ME SOMETHING
President Obama offered to pay for Vice President Biden’s son’s cancer
treatment after finding out Biden was considering selling his house to
pay for it. That’s really kind but… holy shit. If the *Vice President*
has to *sell his house* to pay for healthcare, what chance do regular
Americans have? How is anyone still alive in that country?? Australia,
do not do anything to creep in the direction of America’s healthcare
system. Keep Medicare free. Including frikking pap smears.
Anonymous asked: Important questions in no particular order: what is the Foxhole Court, do I need to give a shit about sports in order to enjoy it, are there LGBT characters/relationships, and in the event that I cave, should I just buy all the books in one fell swoop?
OKAY because I keep seeing it pop up on my dash and it looks like EXACTLY my cup of tea (I’m that person who considers things like Die Hard and, like, fuck, I don’t know, the Mummy and superhero movies and Deadpool to be wholesome cleansing entertainment, intrigue and murder and violence are my shit) and I was just, like, SO CONCERNED that I needed to give a shit about sports. I just. Do not. BUT Check Please! is a gift unto this earth and I kinda give half a fuck about hockey after reading it, so SOLD, I’m gonna go get the first book.
honestly I love angst but I need it to have a happy ending
there are actually basically two reasons for this:
1. Strictly-fictional catharsis. I like characters in bad situations because I like to see them overcome those situations.
2. There are plenty of situations in reality that can’t or don’t have happy endings, or even endings that could qualify as bittersweet. But in stories? Heck yeah, the characters can find happiness after struggling. So a more real, personal sort of catharsis from that end.
‘well you know in real life the good guys don’t always win’ like bitch please i don’t gotta rely on YOUR depressing ass to learn me this important lesson i fucking KNOW now take those boys and let them kiss
A majority of millennial men failed to see women as equals, according to the study, which looked at how college biology students viewed their classmates’ intelligence and achievements, the Harvard Business Review reported.
Among the findings:
In every biology class surveyed, a man was seen as the most celebrated student, even in instances where women earned significantly better grades.
Men were also found to overestimate the intelligence of their male classmates over that of female ones.
Men continued exaggerating their assessments of the male peers, despite unequivocal evidence that their female peers were performing better.
Women, conversely, weren’t found to display a bias: Their assessments of fellow classmates tended to be spot-on.
The National Institutes of Health researchers pointed out that female STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors drop out at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts.
“The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the social environment women experience in the classroom,” they wrote.
Still, scores of men are under the impression that they’ve become the target of reverse sexism. Conservative columnist John Hawkins ranted in Town Hall last year:
“Men have it rougher in America than most people realize. In part, that’s because they’re one of the few groups (along with white people, conservatives, and Christians) it’s cool to crap on at every opportunity. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a nonstop assault on masculinity in America.”
But research has confirmed the reality of gender bias against women. A staggering 90 percent of women reported experiencing gender harassment in the workplace, a 2010 University of Michigan study found. The results suggest that such harassment had the purpose of driving women out of jobs and not the generally assumed motivation of trying to draw women into relationships.
“One could argue that, in these instances, ‘sexual harassment is used both to police and discipline the gender outlaw: the woman who dares to do a man’s job is made to pay,’” the researchers wrote, quoting an article by Katherine M. Franke, an associate professor of law at the University of Arizona College of Law.
As for millennial men specifically, they have been less accepting of female leaders than their older male counterparts, according to a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 adults residing in the United States, the Harvard Business Review reports.
Half of Millenial men said their careers would take priority over their partners’.
Three-fourths of women, on the other hand, said their careers would be at least as important as their husbands’.
oh look its the shit women have been saying all the damn time and antifeminists stamp their feet and cry about
