certifiably brainwash-resistant

Why The Most Educated People in America Fall for Antisemitic Lies

At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds. By Dara Horn

reblog for the most chaos PC we can manage

there is something so darkly comical about tumblr potentially outliving twitter

tumblr, which is held together with duct tape and madness, run by three raccoons in blood stained Yahoo! hats and a handful of crabs, its only discernible source of income the sale of shoelaces from an inside joke so inside no one knows the original source anymore and fake blue checkmarks... that website still lives on

truly the cockroach of social media and I love it for that

amok time

My stepdad is so fucking funny sometimes

#i think this is kind of a sweet thing to say anyway#'your presence in my life has made me remember an otherwise forgettable day'#and the use of 'i didnt have a clue' as if to say 'i was so foolish not to know that my daughter was being born'#even though there was no way he could have known#maybe im just a big sap but 🥹 (via @niamhuncensored)

Hi I just had to share these tags because !!! They are so sweet, but also really accurate to what my stepdad is like-- like yes, you so succinctly interpreted the love in these joking messages. Suddenly a day in July of 1997 when he was a young cafe-working 26 year old becomes special, even though he wouldn't know it for almost 20 years. He really stepped up (pun-intended) as a dad, too. He and my mom started dating when I was eighteen, and since I was an adult, its not like he had any obligation to parent me. But he looked at me and my three younger siblings, (all traumatized and troubled and distrusting because of our biological father) and said "yep, these are my kids now". I remember him calling us that long before he and my mom were even married, striking up conversations with strangers, and if they asked him about kids, he'd laugh and say "I've got four!" He always seems so happy that he went from a family of one to a family of six, basically overnight.

When he proposed to my mom, he bought matching necklaces for us (and a watch for my brother), because he felt he was marrying into the family, not just my mom, and our blessing was really important to him. He's helped me move, helped me with car trouble, talked me down from panic attacks, bought me a laptop for college, drove across LA at 6 in the morning to drop off my hearing aid because I left it at my mom's house and he knew I didn't like going to work without it: just doing a bunch of nice things that I had never experienced from a father-figure before. I wish everyone who has a bad or absent parent would get a loving step-parent replacement!!

tl:dr I love my stepdad and these tags made me cry

If people were too mean to you when you were growing up, a newborn animal will materialize inside your brain and it’s so so scared and shivering and it will stay there for years. Decades, even. And whenever you say something kind of weird but true to your heart the animal will tell you “Noo! You can’t say that! If you say that, everyone will hate you!”. The animal means well. It’s so so small and everything is so scary for them and it’s just trying to protect you. But listen to me. Listen to me. Whenever this happens, you can’t do what the animal says. You can’t. If you do, you’ll become as scared as the animal. You have to keep saying weird shit. You have to keep doing things the animal wouldn’t approve of. If you do enough things that scare the animal, maybe one day it’ll go to sleep.

i think a big reason that I get frustrated with the "liberals have never made anybody's lives better" is that in the US it used to be legal for insurance companies to charge you more if you were sick or even just straight up deny you the ability to sign up for them if you already had a "pre-existing condition", and this was only stopped by the passage of the ACA during Obama's term. but a lot of people who talk about politics on here are too young to really be affected by that since they would have been on their parents insurance (which the ACA required insurers extend until you're 26). and this was all done via politicking and not blowing up insurance CEOs mansions or whatever.

I'm not saying that the ACA fixed insurance forever, god no. but "you can't deny someone insurance for being sick" is a massive change and people don't realize it!

You are underselling the change. Let us recall "rescission," where as soon as it turned out that someone had an expensive medical condition, the insurance company would start coming through their medical history looking for ways to invent a preexisting condition and revoke their coverage.

It really frightens me if kids don't know about how bad the US insurance system used to be.

My dad didn't have any health insurance in his 40s, because he was a freelancer and his (Frankly not bad at all) existing health issues allowed insurunace to fully deny him.

When his girlfriend was dying of cancer they had to have a long discussion about what they'd do when she hit her insurance's lifetime coverage limit and they would no longer cover her cancer care.

People should understand that it was Obama and the Democrats who stopped that kind of thing.

Yeah the way to avoid that shit was to get a group plan through your employer, without that insurance was unaffordable/worthless

And even those group plans were not reliable unless they were huge. I know someone who worked for a smallish company. About 100 people. One of their workers had a child with hemophilia. Required VERY expensive regular infusions to treat. When renewal time came around, the insurance company gave the company management a choice: They could either exclude hemophilia from the plan or double their premium. They got the (Democratic) state insurance commissioner and their (Democratic) state legislator involved and the insurers eventually backed down. But it could have gone the other way. The real solution is a single insurance pool that includes everyone.

Also: medical transition or a gender dysphoria diagnosis could be a preexisting condition.

I was denied insurance outright for having a high BMI and a thyroid condition, despite being in excellent health at the time. Them not being able to do this anymore is huge, actually.

Maybe this is the wrong platform to pose this question given the average tumblr user but

Is it just me or did our generation (those of is who are currently 20-30 ish) just not get the opportunity to be young in the 'standard' sense?

Like, everyone I talk to who's over 40 has all their wild stories about their teens and 20s, being young and dumb, and then I talk to my friends and coworkers and classmates, and we just... dont.

My mom tells stories of skipping school to sneak across the border and spend the day at a bar in Mexico. I was threatened with not being allowed to graduate because of senior ditch day. One of my friends had to go to his first hour class on senior ditch day because the teacher, who almost exclusively taught seniors, arranged a huge exam that day with no available makeup days, specifically to punish kids who took part in ditch day. Our wild and crazy ditch day was playing mini golf and then stopping for ice cream on our way back to one of our friends' houses to play cards against humanity.

Don't get me wrong, we had fun. But all of that, threats of not graduating, threats of failing classes over a single test, over some mini golf and ice cream?

Throughout high school and early in college, my friend group got kicked out of malls, stores, and even a parking lot just for being there wrong. Not being loud of disruptive. Not causing problems. Just being there too long, or without buying anything.

My mom graduated high school, after repeating her senior year, without a single grade above a D, and was offered a full ride scholarship to a state university to play on their women's football team. I had a 3.8 GPA, multiple extracurriculars, a summer job, and over 100 hours of volunteer work, and barely got into that same university, and then couldn't afford to go there anyway.

We've made getting into college so important and yet so difficult that kids are sacrificing their childhoods for it.

Then they become adults and it doesn't go away. Your employer/ potential employers are searching your social media and internet presence so you'd better hope no one has ever posted a picture of you at a party, or with alcohol, or wearing revealing clothes, or whatever else they've deemed unprofessional. And if you want to go out it's a 10 dollar cover and drinks are at least 8 dollars, and you need to tip if there's any kind of live entertainment, who can afford to do all that regularly?

My physical therapist, when I was 18, told me about his 21st birthday, how the last thing he remembers is people taking body shots off him. I spent my 21st birthday alone, was in bed by 10pm because I had to be at work the next morning. My boss had already told me that they knew it was my 21st, and if I called out, she'd write me up for improper use of sick leave because you're not allowed to use sick leave for a hangover. I don't know anyone whose 21st birthday was a big deal. No one went out and partied for it.

I dont really know where I'm going with all of this. I guess I just don't understand the point of it all. We spend our youth working hard to provide a future that we still can't afford. We have to be responsible and professional as teenagers. And we get nothing out of it. We can't afford life or friends or fun. At least our parents got to have fun being young and dumb, we just got groomed on kik.

So I'm not the only one noticing this. I wish I had an answer or at least something to say about it. But I dont. I'm just tired.

It is actually way better for 100 addicts to get their fix on pain pills than a single person in pain go without. I call this the "Torture is bad" principle. You should be able to get the good stuff forever after a single doctor's visit. If you're worried about addicts fund rehab centers and needle exchanges instead of torturing people.

Among other things if you can't use the legit market you turn to the black market anyway.

if you're worried about addiction, build a society where people get their basic needs met, including pain management.

#i also would prefer addicts be on prescription drugs that are exactly what they say they are#rathet than unregulated drugs which are full of who the fuck knows (tags via @shanastoryteller)

i hope this essay isn't unwelcome but i wanted to expand on a previous reblog which mentions turning to the black market: denying people controlled medication out of fear of the addict boogieman literally directly creates and worsens addiction.

as someone who spent a lot of time in hard reduction oriented communities for substance use, one thing you notice real quick: a lot of people with a substance problem have that problem because they were denied or never given access to medical care for a whatever problem the drugs are compensating for (esp common for women, queer people, disabled people, poc, and ofc the poor/uninsured)

and it makes a lot of sense if you think on it for 5 seconds. i'll give two examples off the top of my head.

person A has severe ADHD and/or narcolepsy. they cannot maintain a job without medication, but either cannot afford to jump through diagnostic hoops, or did so and were denied medication anyway. they could say "aw damn" and risk losing their home, families, etc to their untreated illness, or they could go to the black market.

now, these prices are around 5 years old (but i doubt it's gotten cheaper), but lemme break down the logistics:

adderall can be cheap if you live near a college campus or tech city, but on e-markets it'll run you anywhere from .25-$1 per mg in pill form, which could be around $5-30 per dose. long acting stuff like vyvanse is more expensive, and we're boldly assuming the pills are real and correctly dosed.

speed paste availability varies by country but outside of europe it's not common or cheap, and it's not gonna be as potent as pharmacy grade amphetamine

meth, however, is cheap (anywhere from 20-50 per gram), widely available, long lasting, and potent enough to dose as low as 5mg. thats like 15 cents a dose. the drawback? meth is a lot more compulsive, addictive, and neurotoxic than the stuff you'd get at the pharmacy, is often cut or poorly synthesised, has nasty side effects, and is probably a lot stronger than most people need (desoxyn exists, but is rarely prescribed)

easy to see how someone just trying to self medicate could end up with a problem, yeah?

a similar issue crops up with theoretical person b. person b has chronic pain, but either had their medication taken from them due to DEA browbeating their doctor, or was never given anything stronger than tylenol because they were assumed to be faking. if it's a choice between suffering and breaking some laws, the choice is clear. so you go looking for pain meds.

pills advertised as being real (which are often pressed anyway) will often run you at LEAST $1 per mg, often more if it's something like morphine or diluadid (codeine is also weirdly expensive bc it's a meme drug), that could be $100s per day if you need multiple doses.

heroins a little cheaper and stronger, around $100 per gram, which is cheaper than pills

then there's fentanyl. strong, cheap, long lasting, wildly available, and significantly more clear headed and less "high" than most opiates. you can get fentanyl presses for $5 a piece that will last most people a day or more. cheaper in bulk. powder varies wildly. but fentanyl is strong, difficult to accurately dose at home, and builds tolerance/dependence quickly. and once you have physical dependence, missing a dose means flu like symptoms or worse for a week or more.

again, you see how this would fast track someone to addiction?

and i know what you're thinking: what about people doing drugs for fun for real?

well, being honest: most people don't develop addictions from occasional recreational usage, and the ones that do are often self medicating for depression or anxiety or trauma or existential dread. there are some drugs that are significantly MORE recreational if you happen to have anxiety. even if there's a guy out there who really just loves doing drugs and is 100% well adjusted and is just addicted for the lulz: i don't care. that guy still deserves access to safe, accurately dosed, transparently labelled drugs. (this isn't even getting into queer drug culture either bc this is long enough but you'd be surprised how many drugs were banned bc they were popular in queer clubs)

"but why would society continue doing something that very obviously is creating the problem it claims to be fighting?"

simple! many governments (namely the US) want disabled, poor, queer, and brown people to spend their lives working in private prisons or drop dead! denying them access to safe medical/recreational drugs, fast tracking addiction (by creating a situation in which the most accessible options are the most high risk, stigmatised, and heavily criminalised substances on the market), and then dehumanising addicts/drug users to the point even self proclaimed leftists often have no sympathy for them is a quick and convenient way to accomplish exactly that.

anyway i just kind of wrote this essay because i feel like people who have never been in this situation don't understand how someone can wind up addicted to a "scary" drug like meth or fentanyl, you hear a lot of people talk about it like those are "extreme" drugs no "normal" person would ever knowingly try, or that people would only use them if they didn't understand the risks or are Stupid (and therefore "deserve" any harmful side effects) and that's just not true. the fact of the matter is these Spooky Scary Substances are often the cheapest and most accessible options on the market, and if you can't afford to jump through medical hoops, you probably can't afford the Expensive black market options either. and i thought breaking down the pricing and logistics and providing real world examples might put things into perspective, because honestly you probably won't hear it from anyone else.

speaking of chinese horse memes this one is still my absolute favorite and at the risk of killing the joke by explaining it i must at least try to translate

loosely—

and the keywords here are 马上 in the second panel, which put together mean "immediately" but individually mean horse (马) and up or on (上)

so 马上讲 can both mean "tell me immediately" and, more literally, "tell me on the horse"

tbh i didnt know you were supposed to be jerking off while you look at porn

ive been standing with my arms behind my back ponderously like at a museum

wait wait you’ve been pondering at the museum? I’ve just been jerking off there

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

what’s in the pot

I'd say this is an anomaly but seriously roos are sometimes nosy and just need to be in your business, OR they will fight you if you look at them funny. I love them, they're great, but they make little sense.

The fucking horror I felt in my soul of the 3 seconds it took to try to and work out what the fuck this animal was

there needs to be more lgbt books written by people who have never heard of twitter