1. The Republican Party turns out for EVERY vote. Primaries, local elections, midterms, you name it. Most dems show up once every four year and then get defeatist when things don’t immediately change. It took the Republicans YEARS to overturn RvW but it has been a long game goal of theirs. YEARS of voting, and you’re gonna opt out after one vote. Okay.

2. Primaries are when you vote for who you want. Elections are when you vote for who you can. If you’re not voting in the primary, you’re letting the moderate centrist do-nothing candidate win.

3. Local elections affect your daily life. That sherif in Texas who is refusing to enforce the abortion ban? Local election. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, so much of this is trickle up from local politics.

4. Call your damn representatives. Even if it feels hopeless. The gun control reform that just passed (as minimal as it is) was bipartisan because people showed their reps that they wanted change. Get vocal as a voter and prove courting your vote matters.

5. If someone in your area is running for office and needs votes, be a signature for them. Not everyone can afford to pay to run. You want to support better candidates, put your name behind them (only in your district and always read what you’re signing first).

6. The two party system is shit. We know that. But the democrats are a big tent housing a lot of different opinions and trying to cater to them all. Republicans are generally united in one mission of dismantling everything and protecting only their own. This is also why Dems don’t have the same type of “super majority” and can’t easily whip the same voting results. And anyone who thinks Obama had a super majority for enough time to codify roe does not understand politics. He had about 18 days of actual in-session time, split into two different sessions.

7. Purity politics isn’t going to get you anywhere. The candidate is a bus stop getting you closer to where you want to be. They’re not the end goal, and a smart voter knows that.

8. Voter suppression is huge in America. Help other voters register and get to the polls. It’s not always indifference keeping people from voting. Do something to help disenfranchised voters.

Let me repeat: The two party system is shit. We need to get rid of the electoral college. We need ranked choice voting. We need to get rid of Citizens United. Our country is an oligarchy. Always has been. Not denying that. But Living in these ideals of what we should be without creating any change now isn’t going to get you anywhere. Being defeatist and abstaining from the process is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. Its saying “the other team is scoring too many goals, so instead of playing, I’m just gonna sit on the sidelines. That’ll teach everyone.” No, you’re just gonna keep losing. Maybe, instead, vote in the primaries and choose better teammates.

Y’all kill me with these “hot takes.” They ain’t even half baked.

Now, if you want to talk about the other things we should be doing IN ADDITION TO voting, like general strikes, organizing, etc. Then that’s a different conversation we should also be having.

Also no, there is no such thing as “one more vote.” Vote every time. Vote consistently. Vote national. Vote local. It’s the absolute MINIMAL amount of civil engagement you can do. If you can do more than vote, do more, but at least vote every single time.

A lot of people really think democracy is something they only have to do once. It's not. It's something we do constantly - because greedy and power-hungry and malicious people are constantly trying to take advantage of society. Evil never stops, so neither do we.

Evil never stops, so neither do we.

VOTE.

when lizzo said “self love is survival” and when hannah gadsby said “do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from somebody who already exists in the margins? it’s not humility. it’s humiliation” and when mitski said “i used to rebel by destroying myself, but realized that’s awfully convenient to the world. for some of us our best revolt is self preservation”

when audre lorde said “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”

i was with my mother’s family and they were talking to me about my religious studies major. my great aunt asked me what the definition of hell was, and i responded “well i suppose it depends on who you ask.” and nearly all the protestants in the group decided that hell was “the absence of god” which i suppose is a fair answer, albeit not a universal one. my cousin’s wife was playing with her 3-year-old daughter and she says “well mommy says that hell is a mcdonald’s playplace” asdfghjhgfd

this 3-year-old girl is so fucking hilarious. her mothers have signed her up for a toddler yoga class, and so she has adopted a very unique language. this child also has an imaginary friend named “mom” which is, in her mind, the boss of her two mothers. for example, my cousin’s wife explained to me how her daughter got mad at them one time. the little girl situated herself in the corner of her crib, pretended to type on a cell phone and said  “im writing an email to mom right now and telling her how bad you two are. namaste.”

the family’s Big Theory about “Mom” is that both my cousin and her wife are referred to as “Mommy” and “Mama.” The nickname “Mom” is not used in the house because it would just be confusing. However, when interacting with the world, people tell their daughter that they will “tell her mom” if she is doing something wrong. so this child automatically assumes there is this greater “Mom” figure that is responsible for distributing universal justice. 

To be fair to the toddler, that’s pretty much how religions get started.

Our Mom, who art gonna hear about this,

What a year this week has been.

It’s Monday.

It sure as hell is.

The earlier in the day Monday you reblog the funnier this gets

why must reductress hurt me in this way

ok a) lmao me too girl, and

b) once burnout hits you CANNOT work that hard, by your standards, so odds are it actually hit a while ago and you just “powered through” because that’s what you’re used to doing. So now, every day, you’re hitting your limit and thinking “wtf man i used to be able to do this, i used to be competent, clever, diligent” and like yeah. you were. and that burns glucose. welcome to the dumb bitch zone.

and c), lmao, me too girl

fuck b) came for me harder than the first post did god damn

If you like Hawai'i because it's fucking beautiful and the waters are perfectly clear.

Then you should support the decolonization of Hawai'i and give it back to the indigenous peoples there because they are why it's so beautiful and the waters are perfectly clear.

And while we're at it support #Land Back because if we give authority to care for the indigenous people here on the main land, we can probably have a place that's that beautiful as well (assuming it's not too far gone yet).

-fae

@wingedknighterrant

Native Hawaiians are only a minority because colonizers came in, brought diseases, murdered them, then forced them to convert to Christianity.

You don't get to gather a group of your best friends, break into a house, kill the whole family but the kid, live there for 20 years, then complain about minority rule when the kid says "Yo. Can I have my house back?"

-fae

it’s funny because yes, you CAN disable right click save, but it takes like an extra two seconds to get around it because of how images are displayed on websites. (technically you could also just screenshot but this gets you a real jpg)

for example, instagram has disabled right click save. here I am trying to save a picture of this girl with a pumpkin sweater, but I am thwarted by the lack of right click save!

to get around it, right click and go to “inspect” or “inspect element” (it’s called different things depending on what computer you’re using)

shimmy around the webpage code until you find the “src” bit. It will helpfully tell you when you’ve found it because the image, and only the image, will light up as if you selected it.

that source is the link to where the image is hosted on the website. click the link.

find the actual hosted image. right click on that.

check and mate.

reblogging this version so people can piss off the NFT bros better

I love talking about this so here's another instance of me talking about it: during the 504 Sit-Ins, wherein disabled activists occupied federal buildings in 1977 demanding better protections from the US government as they delayed enacting the regulations set forth in 1973's Rehabilitation Act, specifically the section entitled 504, which was supposed to provide better access to education and employment for disabled people, and the accommodations needed for such.

The activists, disabled or sick in a variety of ways, occupied multiple federal buildings across the the USA. The occupation of 50 United Nations Plaza Federal Office Building in San Francisco lasted 26 days, the longest of the protests, and I believe the longest occupation of a federal building in the USA's history.

The protest was spear-headed and led mostly by disabled women, many of them queer disabled women.

The length of the occupation was only made possible by the support of the Black Panthers, who brought food to the activists daily and stood their ground against the FBI when the feds tried to stop them from entering the plaza in an attempt to starve the protesters out. The Black Panthers then proceeded to bring hot meals every day for the rest of the protest, which ended with the enactment of the 504 regulation

Moral of the story: mass movements and protests work better when you have solidarity among various movements who, while initially fighting for different people, are all fighting for a common goal--rights, safety, empowerment, etc--and the Black Panther Party was demonized by the federal government and individual authorities not only because they were they fighting for the rights, safety, and empowerment of Black people, but because they were fully capable of and did bring unity among the many civil rights groups fighting for the individual causes, in a way that would have enacted great change in this country had they not been infiltrated and destroyed from within, arrested on bs charges, or flat out murdered by the federal government.

Anyway the history of disabled rights are unknown even among the modern disabled, the involvement of the Black Panther Party is even less known, and without the 504 regulation laying down the base foundation we probably wouldn't have the ADA so here's your history lesson informing you about all this. And thank you Black Panthers ✊🏿♿✊

Bummed you were unable to participate in this momentous occasion of disability rights history? You can still make history now.

There's an act proposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio called the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act. Social Security is seriously broken in this country. The max amount one can receive from SSI is seven hundred and seventy-one dollars a month, and you have a max asset limit of two thousand total. This is below the federal poverty levels, and with very few exceptions you cannot earn any money or even receive any as gifts without reporting it to SSI and risk docking your monthly payments. Even giftcards are dicey.

Also, people on SSI can't get married without losing their benefits. We can't even symbolically call someone our wife, husband, or partner without SSI penalizing us

It's enforced poverty. And it's an ordeal to even get on it, because as abysmal as it is it's the only option for people who cannot work. I believe the statistic is only one in ten will be approved first time applying (I believe legal blindness is an automatic approval). And it's nearly impossible to appeal or reapply without a lawyer. I was rejected three times before I had the resources to lawyer up, and I had to pay a third of my earnings. Also, when I first applied and was rejected in Indiana, I lost my life-saving Medicaid, thanks to a new law by then-governor mike pence, who enacted that only those on disability can receive Medicaid. I had had Hoosier Healthwise since I was a child and had been grandfathered in, but upon my inevitable rejection I was disqualified from Medicaid. I didn't get back on it until I moved to Maryland. I was never informed by the people helping me apply about the risk to my Medicaid.

Disabled and chronically ill people are never educated on our rights, resources, and what we can do for ourselves. My high school econ class would have been better served teaching us about Social Security (or even how to pay taxes) instead of telling my school where sixty percent of us were in poverty that our only way to success was in the stock market (during the Great Recession, no less). I didn't know anything about what I posted above until I was an adult and advocating for myself. Disability rights were never covered in Social Studies, and in fact in the years leading up to the Affordable Care Act, the right to medical coverage was forced to be a topic of debate in that class, as well as the right for wellfare. A good chunk of my classes genuinely argued against my right to have access to medical care.

Because of this lack of education, many people needing SSI have no knowledge or resources on how to find a lawyer, so they face the appeal in front of a judge alone and inevitably lose. Their only options then are to either give up, or try again and again and again.

But the legislation proposed by Sen. Sherrod Brown is called "Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act. Without linking (so it will show up in the reblogs), here's what the Washington Examiner says about it:

Not mentioned in the article, but I've heard from others in the Disability community that it will allow us to get married.

I know with disability and life long illness tend to have anxiety, I get it believe me, but now is the time to start making our presence known. We need to call our reps and let them know we exist, we're voters, and we need this legislation passed. If you know of any groups mobilizing for physical protests, join up with them and do as much as you are safely and physically able. (And if you know of any such groups in Baltimore, let me know).

Not only that but we call upon our allies to help us.

This is life saving legislation proposed to a government that largely doesn't care about our lives. So it's time for action. Let's raise hell like the disabled activists before us.

You should all be reblogging this version

August 2021

So, this hasn't crossed my dash yet. (Not blaming anyone, there is soooo much going on in the world and I'd also missed it in the noise).

There is currently a strike at Frito-Lay. in Topeka. These workers are striking because:

They were being forced to work 84 hour weeks. The company's best offer so far is a 60 hour cap. This is shit we fought for a century ago, people.

Their generous offer also includes a whole 4 percent wage increase...over the next 2 years. I'm not sure what COL is in Topeka, but... Well, it's better than the entire 77 cents they've apparently gotten in the last decade.

There's also a report that a worker literally collapsed and dropped dead on the line and the foreman's response was to make them move the body out of the way and put in a replacement. (However, this is unconfirmed and, of course, the company denies it).

There have been multiple OSHA violations at this plant over the last few years, including a forklift accident that's under investigation.

They've now been striking since July 5 but, of course, it only hit the national media yesterday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/14/frito-lay-strike-forced-overtime/

So, why am I signal boosting this?

Because Frito-Lay is refusing to budge. They are attempting to make the excuse that union leadership agreed to the 60 hour work week and crappy pay cut...when union leadership only agreed to put it to a vote.

And this means that we need to put the thumbscrews on them. Remember, this is about 19th century style working conditions.

So, I'm calling on my followers to boycott Frito Lay's until the strike is involved.

Frito-Lay owns:

Lay's

Doritos (Sorry. I really am. I KNOW there's no good alternative to Doritos, although Zapp's are good if you can find them).

Fritos

Tostitos

Cheetos

Ruffles

Sun Chips

Baken-ets

Chester's

Cracker Jack

Islen plantain chips

Funyuns

Grandma's (the cookies)

Matador Meat Snacks

Maui style potato chips

Miss Vickie's

Munchies

Munchos

Rolled Gold

Sabritones

Santitas

Simply

Smartfood

Stacys

The Walking Taco

NatuChips

PopCorners (this one wasn't on their website, but was bought by Pepsi's in 2019 with the intent of adding it. So best avoided just in case). Yes, this really is more than half of the snack aisle. Suggested alternatives:

Kettle Brand Chips

Zapp's (If you can find them. My supermarket had them once and not since, so I'm guessing the culinary cowards in this neighborhood were afraid of "Voodoo" flavored chips).

Pringles

On the Border for salsa.

Wise Cheez Doodles

Bugles

Utz

Store own brand alternatives, if your store has ones that are any good.

Cheez-its

Check before you buy and let's tell these people they don't get to treat workers like that.

just to add support to this but also, Frito-Lay is a part of PepsiCo so also avoid

Pepsi products

Gatorade

Tropicana

Quaker Oats

but more than just avoiding them, if you can, tell them that you are and *why* you are. Bad press and a drop in sales is good leverage.

There's some discussion about whether or not the boycott should extend to Pepsi products. I would say go with your conscience on that.

So hey FYI there’s a local fundraiser here in Topeka to help striking workerss, if y’all’d like to donate. 785 is a Topeka-area culture/arts/lifestyle magazine and they’re working with the local union president to distribute the funds. They met their original goal already, to have enough to cover utility bills for the month, but any extra is still getting distributed as strike relief so please consider donating if you can <3

what to do when everything’s a mess

Green explotion

The sheer energy. The beauty of this woman. The women hugging in the background. The man in rainbow parachute pants. This whole video is art.

I wanna know where this is

Huh, I never actually thought about dancing in rollerskates. And she’s just fucking working it! Also her outfit is so bright and warm it fits the vibe perfect! A Queen

this is Oumi Janta! this style of skate dancing is called jamskating, and she’s an incredibly talented jamskater to make moves this hard look this easy. she’s also appeared in several ad campaigns!

suddenly remembered this poem as i was making breakfast this morning & frantically googled “poem remembered to buy eggs?????????” & somehow managed to find it & it utterly knocked the wind out of me just as much as when i first read it

I never wanted to die, but fuck, there was a big chunk where I wasn’t super interested in life even when I thought “everything is ok” but ok was not getting out of bed ever.

This is better.

Oh my god ❤️

Absolutely love this

Wow.

Please watch this. 

i was a little apprehensive to watch this because it’s four minutes long and i have a short attention span, but within the first 30 seconds i was hooked.

watch this. please, you won’t regret it.

If this story doesn’t give people the slightest bit of hope, nothing will. This is AMAZING.

This is beautiful. Stories like this need to live on. Please watch and share.

Oh my Lord! Tragic but beautiful 😢❤️

just to be clear, the fact that music was nominated for a golden globe is absolutely disgusting. every single (adult) involved in that gross, ableist movie should be sickened by themselves.

for those of you who don't know, music (2021) is a movie being directed by sia about a nonverable autistic girl. not only does it not include any actually autistic people in the movie itself but it also only took advice from autism speaks which is looked at as a hate group by the majority of the autistic community. leaked scenes have also shown the movie glorifying prone restraints which are incredibly dangerous and have resulted in major injuries and even death to disabled people as recently as last year.

autistic people just like me have been incredibly outspoken about how harmful this movie is but the allistic have been mostly silent. we are already seeing reviews calling this movie 'inspiring' and important' and it's absolutely horrific! we need your help calling this out. please stand with us and call out this disgusting display of disrespect to autistic folks.

💛 - your local actually autistic pal

p.s. please, please reblog if you aren't autistic.