Έλευθερία

jadelyn:

likeadeadchinadoll:

and for those interested, you can find the report HERE

Just in case any dudebros are unclear on what this means: it means that your buddy who totally just had some bitch trying to ruin his life by accusing him of rape almost certainly did rape her.  

Keep that in mind.

acidshenko:

canadian-communist:

Take a look at this picture. Do you know who it is?

Most people haven’t heard of him.

But you should have. When you see his face or hear his name you should get as sick in your stomach as when you read about Mussolini or Hitler or see one of their pictures. You see, he killed over 10 million people in the Congo.

His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.

He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He disguised his “business transactions” as philanthropic and scientific efforts under the banner of the “International African Society”. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, executions, torture, and his private army.

Most of us – I don’t yet know an approximate percentage but I fear its extremely high – aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the widely repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction of the white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into a capitalist curriculum. Its bad to “say racist things” (sometimes), but quite fine not to talk about genocides in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist monarchs.

Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s soliloquy; a defense of his Congo rule“, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. Its 49 pages long. Mark Twain is a popular author for American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them (Orwell’s Animal Farm for example serves to re-inforce American anti-Socialist propaganda, but Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind – this is never pointed out). We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but King Leopold’s Soliloquy isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom well. From the point of view of the Education Department, Africans have no history.

When we learn about Africa, we learn about a caricaturized Egypt, about the HIV epidemic (but never its causes), about the surface level effects of the slave trade, and maybe about South African Apartheid (which of course now is long, long over). We also see lots of pictures of starving children on Christian Ministry commercials, we see safaris on animal shows, and we see pictures of deserts in films and movies. But we don’t learn about the Great African War or Leopold’s Reign of Terror during the Congolese Genocide. Nor do we learn about what the United States has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially killing in upwards of 5-7 million people from bombs, sanctions, disease and starvation. Body counts are important. And we don’t count Afghans, Iraqis, or Congolese.

There’s a Wikipedia page called “Genocides in History”. The Congolese Genocide isn’t included. The Congo is mentioned though. What’s now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo is listed in reference to the Second Congo War (also called Africa’s World War and the Great War of Africa), where both sides of the multinational conflict hunted down Bambenga and ate them. Cannibalism and slavery are horrendous evils which must be entered into history and talked about for sure, but I couldn’t help thinking who’s interests were served when the only mention of the Congo on the page was in reference to multi-national incidents where a tiny minority of people were  eating each other (completely devoid of the conditions which created the conflict no less). Stories which support the white supremacist narrative about the subhumanness of people in Africa are allowed to be entered into the records of history. The white guy who turned the Congo into his own personal part-plantation, part-concentration camp, part-Christian ministry and killed 10 to 15 million Conglese people in the process doesn’t make the cut.

You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture doesn’t produce fear, hatred, and sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered.

Leopold was just one part of thousands of things that helped construct white supremacy as both an ideological narrative and material reality. Of course I don’t want to pretend that in the Congo he was the source of all evil. He had generals, and foot soldiers, and managers who did his bidding and enforced his laws. It was a system. But this doesn’t negate the need to talk about the individuals who are symbolic of the system. But we don’t even get that. And since it isn’t talked about, what capitalism did to Africa, all the privileges that rich white people gained from the Congolese genocide are hidden. The victims of imperialism are made, like they usually are, invisible.

Tony Bourdain referenced this on his program about a week and a half ago. The mention wasn’t very lengthy, but it was enough to make me actually look it up.

I was absolutely horrified. 

nevver:

1. You shall treat all people with respect regardless of race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, or national origin.
2. You shall not kill, assault, nor intimidate with threats of physical violence.
3. You shall not rape, sexually coerce, nor intimidate with threats of sexual violence. 
4. You shall cultivate intellectual curiosity, be open to new ideas, and  respect the scientific method.
5. You shall not cheat, nor cheat others out of what is rightfully theirs.
6. You shall not lie, deceive, nor spread lies about others. 
7. You shall not steal, that is to say take or use what rightfully belongs to another person in a manner that causes harm. (Stealing is a trickier concept than it once was. How do you say yes to Fair Use and no to software patents?)
8. You shall keep your promises.
9. You shall not waste natural resources nor pollute the shared environment.
10. You shall take responsibility for your actions and their consequences.

The Fresh Ten

alexandraerin:

geekykristie:

A trans woman will be playing a trans woman on Elementary.

More and more I feel like Robert Doherty was at some point a hardcore Sherlock fan who became fed up and went “I SHALL MAKE MY OWN SHOW WITH WOMEN AND MINORITIES EXPLORING ADDICTION STIGMA, ALSO MYSTERIES.”

Bless him. 

I haven’t read past the first sentence of this post. I can’t. I am too choked up to go further. Oh my gosh, I am sitting here crying.

 A trans woman will be playing a trans woman on Elementary.

writingsforwinter:

Dear Ana,

I wonder if you know that yesterday all the neighbors left casseroles

on your back porch because they thought you’d already died,

and even the undertaker knows your first, middle, and last name by heart.

Ana, you poor broken little girl. You’d drop coins into your mouth one by one

and make wishes to be even skinnier, just ten pounds more, please God,

if only you weren’t so scared that a few extra calories would be hanging off

that copper skin. This is a hunger strike; you sit crosslegged

on the driveway holding up your precious sign begging for more passersby

to buy a little more of your flesh, My ass is too thick, my arms too flabby,

Thick, luscious flesh for only 50 cents!

Ana, remember how everyone used to pass notes in grade school,

paper scrawled with love letters and smiley faces, slipping

through sweaty fingers? Ana, can you pass notes in your collarbones now?

They don’t teach us about you in health class because you are weak,

and weakness is not something to be tolerated. They don’t teach us

about you because they are too afraid the pictures of your thighs

will be too graphic. Your wrists like toothpicks,

your ribs like a ladder where all this hunger is trying to crawl out,

rung by rung, and escape from you.

Ana, I’ve seen you get down on your knees

in the middle of Sunday service and pray for size zero jeans;

I’ve seen you refuse the Communion wafers and wine

out of fear they’d fatten you up too much. Ana, you

are pushing your luck. Your hair is falling out; so much of it

is already gone that you could wear a sweater made out of

your own blonde strands. Tell me, do you wear it well?

Will the boys swoon over you now?

Today your mother forces you to stand on the scale,

but the numbers mean nothing. Ana, 110! Ana, 105!

Ana, 100, 95. 94. 93. Ana, 86!

I’ve seen the moon eat more than you do; it swallows the sky

every night and always goes back for seconds.

Even a mouse hoards more cheese than you do.

Dear Ana, yesterday a boy tried to hold your hand on the way home

from school but it disintegrated into dust between his fingers.

The day before that he tried to kiss you on the mouth

but your lips were so dry it was like swallowing sandpaper.

Dear Ana, this is for all the times you tried to hold your own ghost

just to give it a little comfort, but it slipped away in your arms.

I am writing you a letter and in it I am standing on the ceiling

of the Eiffel Tower and screaming fuck you, fuck you

at the top of my lungs. Because fuck you Ana, that’s why.

You’re just a poor, scared little girl and you are taking this baseball bat

and you are beating the shit out of yourself until there is nothing left

but blood and guts. But you never had the guts to start treating yourself

well; you only had the blood when the constant throwing up

gave you ulcers. Dear Ana, fuck you.

Dear Ana, I will not stand beside you and watch you wither away

into brittle autumn leaves. I will not watch you do this to yourself.

Your body is a burning building and I will not be the one to fetch

the fire hose. That is your job. Always has been.

Ana, aim the nozzle at the living room.

Hose that sucker down.

brashblacknonbeliever:

With Father’s day fast approaching, I would like to send a shout out to the people typically ignored on days like this:

• To the people with abusive fathers
• To the people absentee fathers
• To the people who don’t know their fathers
• To the people who cut their fathers…

mentalscubadiving:

Helpful:

• “You’re doing a great job dealing with the situation.”
• “What you are doing is very difficult and you’ve done so much already (list her actions).”
• “It sounds like you have really thought a lot about the situation and what you want to do.”
• “You really care a lot about your children. You are a wonderful mom.”
• “You are not to blame for being abused.”
• “You are not the cause of another’s violent behavior.”
• “You deserve to be treated with respect.”
• “You deserve to make your life safe and happy.”
• “You are not alone. You can ask/have asked others to help you.”
• “Things may be different now than before, and you and your children may have a different routine, but it may help you and your children live safely.”
• “I am glad you are here with me now.”
• “I’m sorry it happened.”
• “It wasn’t your fault.”
• “It is ok for you to feel _______________.”
• “You are not going crazy.”
• “Things may never be same, but they can be better.”

Harmful:

• “I understand.”
• “You’re lucky that….”
• “You’ll get over it, it will just take a little time.”
• “I know how you feel.”
• “Everything will be alright, don’t worry.”
• “Try to be strong for your children.”
• “Calm down and try to relax.”
• “Why didn’t you________________?”
• “I think you should _______________.”

cakeandrevolution:

sunshineuncertaintyprinciple:

cakeandrevolution:

bootyregrit:

captain-ray-assbutt:

Dear people who claim that vaccines cause autism, therefore people shouldn’t vaccinate their kids,

vaccines exist to prevent deadly illnesses. You are literally saying that endangering your child’s life is preferable to them being autistic. Never mind whether they actually do cause it or not, you’re saying that death is preferable to autism.

Congrats, you’re a piece of shit and the autistic person/people in your life deserve better.

actually vaccines exist for the profit of the pharmaceutical corporations.

vaccination and immunisation are two different things. bet ya didn’t know that because you don’t know your ass from a hole in the fucking ground.

every disease ‘cured’ by vaccination was, in reality, controlled by better living conditions, better nutrition and better hygiene.  Tell me how you think we got rid of scurvy, scarlet fever and reduced the incidences of typhus in the first world without vaccines? But how is whitey gonna spin a massive profit from that mundane shit?

well done on being a talking monkey with zero research skills, fucknuts.

It’s really rich for you to talk about not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground when you’re comparing Scurvy (a vitamin deficiency), Scarlet Fever (a bacterial infection that actually does still exist, one of my friends niece and nephew got it this year, it’s just an advanced form of Strep), and Typhus (another bacterial infection), with the VIRUSES that vaccinations are intended to prevent.

Before I start, your comparison is kinda like saying “we can treat cuts with bandaids so I don’t know why you insist on setting that broken bone”.

Let’s get a little more detailed, so you can see just how fucking wrong you are and how ignorant your little screed was.

A condition like scurvy is simply the symptoms that manifest when the human body has a deficiency in one of more nutrients, in the case of scurvy it’s vitamin C, but Vitamin A deficiency can lead to blindness and there are various other vitamins that either too much of or too little of can have deleterious effects. The treatments for these are simple, either change diet to address the imbalance or in sever cases take a supplement to treat. Also, how fucking classist of you to think that we’ve gotten rid of it when Scurvy still effects the very poor and Vitamin A deficiency still claims the lives of 670k children under 5 annually.

Bacteria are single celled organisms capable of reproducing on their own. The human immune system can deal with bacteria through white blood cells consuming and destroying the bacteria or through the immune system generating anti-bodies that bind with the receptor sites that the bacteria uses to bond with cells. We also have nifty antibiotics which can directly kill off bacteria once in the human body.

Some bacterial infections, like pertussis and tuberculosis are VERY difficult to treat through standard antibacterial therapies and without detection within days of infection can still be lethal or life altering in the damage they cause. As it takes the body about 2 weeks to generate an antibody for an infection that it hasn’t encountered before we have largely relied on vaccination (and quite successfully at that) to prevent serious cases of these bacterial infections from being able to take hold as the secondary anamnestic response time (read, production of anti-bodies that the immune system remembers from previous encounters) peaks in 1-3 days. The difference between a pertussis infection with a primary antibody generation response and that with a secondary anamnestic response can quite literally be the difference between life or death.

Once a virus is in the body though the only way to treat them is to manage the symptoms and try and boos the immune systems response. There are a handful of anti-viral cocktails but they have limited efficacy and only work on a handful of viruses. Unlike bacteria viruses depend on taking over host cells and using them to reproduce, once the virus has stripped all it can from the host cell it bursts open spreading more viruses to infect other cells repeating the process. Many viruses also directly target the immune system rendering an effective immune response impossible which is why many of the viruses which we are vaccinated against are still lethal if contracted even in medically advanced countries (Other than vaccination, treatment of smallpox is primarily supportive, such as wound care and infection control, fluid therapy, and possible ventilator assistance.). Therefore we have to rely on vaccination to give our immune systems that antibody memory that I discussed above.

Viruses reproduce at a logarithmic rate, compared to the doubling rate of bacteria, With each new generation of a bacteria the number of new bacteria is at most double the number of the previous generation, however take a virus that can produce 50 copies for each infected cell. Say you initially get infected with 5 active copies of the virus (and these numbers are small for ease of comprehension, typical infection numbers are much higher). Those 5 viruses infect 5 cells and produce 250 new viruses, those 250 viruses turn into 12,500, which turns into 625,000, so you went from 5 to over a half million in 3 generations, (5 bacteria would yield 40 bacteria in 3 generations for comparison). This is why we can’t rely on primary immune responses for viral infections, they simply aren’t fast enough. In the two weeks it takes for antibodies to form for the kind of lethal viruses that we vaccinate against the human immune system has likely already been overwhelmed. However, if we provide the immune system with the memory of the anti-bodies needed it can provide an immune response much more efficiently and deal with the virus before it becomes a major threat. By keeping people vaccinated for these viruses it also prevents them from establishing a foothold in communities and spreading, it also protects those who can’t be vaccinated (due to compromised immune systems among other reasons) from infection through herd immunity, reducing the chances that those they come into contact with could be infected reduces the chances that the immuno-compromised will come into contact with those viruses.

tl,dr: You don’t know fuck all about viruses, bacteria, nutritional deficiencies, immunology, or vaccines, and your comment showed nothing but a massive amount of haughty ignorance. How about you actually learn something about biology before you try and act like I’m the one who needs to do research.

Reblogging for that awesome NDT picture.